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Long EC2 Instance IDs Are Fully Supported

Last year, Amazon announced that longer EC2 resource IDs were coming. Today, they are available and you can opt-in. In December 2016, they will be turned on for anyone who has not opted-in yet. More information can be seen in their official announcement:

What Does This Mean?

Until now, all EC2 instance IDs were “i-“ followed by 8 hexidecimal characters. For example, “i-a582e114”. Once you opt-in to the longer EC2 instance IDs, new EC2 instances IDs will be “i-“ followed by 17 hexidecimal characters. For example, “i-06d4a030f97f1c445”. Not a big difference, but if you use software that is validating or storing EC2 instance IDs and it assumes that EC2 instance IDs are the old format, then opting-in could break the software.

The Details

You can opt-in to the new behaviour a couple of different ways:

For the entire AWS account.

For one or more IAM users only.

For one or more resource types:

Instance IDs

Reservation IDs

For one or more regions.

Opting-in to the longer resource IDs won’t affect existing resources. So if you have an existing EC2 instance, it’s instance ID will not change.

Once you opt-in, when you create a new EC2 instance, that new EC2 instance can and/or will have a longer instance ID. Only the creation of new resources are affected.

One catch: if one user opts-in and creates an EC2 instance which has a longer instance ID, then all users of that same AWS account will see the longer instance ID, whether they have opted-in or not.

You can opt-out again if needed. But existing resources with longer IDs won’t be affected.

The Good News

Skeddly fully supports the new resource ID format. So please feel free to opt-in to the new, longer resource IDs when it’s suitable for you to do so.